Category Archives: Immigration Info

On Monday, February 16, 2015, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Brownsville Division issued a preliminary injunction to temporarily prevent the federal government from implementing the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) and the expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programs. The order was issued as Judge Hanen continues to consider the lawsuit brought in December 2014 by twenty-six states seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the United States and

Under President Barack Obama’s immigration executive order, announced on Thursday, November 20, 2014, illegal immigrants who have minor run-ins with law enforcement will not have to worry about the incident triggering deportation. Obama is ordering a series of administrative changes in rules and refocusing enforcement priorities and prosecutorial discretion. Combined, these actions, are in line with past presidential precedents and therefore can survive a legal challenge. Here are some of the changes that will allow about 5 million illegal immigrants

“Obama’s Plan Legalizes Millions!”… “Obama’s Executive Action will Legalize up to 5 Million,” “Obama’s Plan to Legalize Millions is Unconstitutional”… As an immigration consultant, these headlines (and the debate that follows) makes my blood boil. Why? Because the headlines are wrong, they are lies. The rightwing conservatives (Republicans) are lying as usual to the people in the United States. These headlines, these sound bites, printed and repeated across the media spectrum (TV and radio) over the last few days are not only

Every law seems to have unintended consequences. The original intent of granting citizenship to every baby born on U.S. soil (done within the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) was to avoid creating an underclass, particularly among people who were brought to the U.S. as slaves. (Congress was responding to the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the U.S. Supreme Court denied citizenship rights to freed slaves.) Now, however, a cottage industry has seemingly developed to assist people

It was only a matter of time, really. First, there was “birth tourism,” in which people from around the world who are interested in gaining a foothold in the U.S. arrange to enter as tourists and have a child here — their own little U.S. citizen “anchor baby.” Now, some parents are avoiding that nerve-wracking plane ride while pregnant, and simply arranging to have surrogate women in the U.S. give birth and cede their parental rights to them. For real.

Lawyers tend to take very seriously their duty to keep their own client’s confidential information — otherwise known as secrets — to themselves. But guess what: They get a little fuzzier on the question of whether that duty extends to the clients on the other side of a case, for example in a divorce or other civil case, or in a criminal case. And in a particularly ugly example of how this can play out, the State of Washington’s Latino/a

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) just published its first-ever report summarizing the “Characteristics of Individuals Requesting and Approved for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).” The report supplies demographic information about people who requested DACA between August 2012 to September 2013 and were approved by January 2014, in these categories: age range gender country of birth marital status state of residence Citizens of Mexico are, to no one’s surprise, the largest pool of applicants by far, followed by El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

Sometimes what’s going in in the headlines becomes all too personal. That’s what happened for me recently, when a friend called to say that her cleaning woman from El Salvador was in a panic, having received word that her sisters had been arrested by immigration authorities after crossing the border into Texas. They’re apparently part of the flood of young people fleeing countries beset by violence, attempting to cross the Mexican border into the United States. The first question then becomes,

The U.S. immigration laws contain numerous grounds upon which non-citizens, including green card holders, may be deported back to their country of origin. There are several reasons for the U.S. immigration authorities to deport an immigrant – that is, send the person back to his or her country of origin. One of the most obvious is that the immigrant simply did not have a right to be in the United States to begin with, having crossed the border or otherwise

Can relatives come to the U.S.? It depends on how the family member is related. Many people in the United States have family members living in other countries, and wonder whether they can bring them here. It’s a myth that if one immigrant settles in the United States, that one can get green cards (permanent residence) for the whole extended family, and so on. The truth is both more limited and more complex. Who You Can Help Immigrate You can